'Where's Marco?" was one of the most oft-uttered expressions before Monday's Iowa caucuses answered that question with a resounding: "Right where he wants and needs to be."
In the weeks leading up to the Iowa vote, Marco Rubio's rivals for the Republican presidential campaign disparaged his peekaboo campaign, which spurned the traditional approach to winning the opening contest of the U.S. primary season. Instead of smothering Iowans with up-close-and-personal attention, Mr. Rubio almost seemed aloof, making far fewer appearances than his main adversaries and all but ignoring large swaths of the state.
Mr. Rubio's soft-sell campaign – in contrast to Texas Senator Ted Cruz's aggressive on-the-ground operation in every Iowa county and billionaire Donald Trump's utter dominance of the (unpaid) airwaves – was making his donors nervous. Markets that bet on political outcomes had downgraded his chances of winning the Republican nomination to also-ran status behind Mr. Trump.
Needless to say, Mr. Rubio's stock surged on Tuesday after his unexpectedly strong third-place finish in Iowa, within a whisker of Mr. Trump. His claims on the nomination just became a lot more credible as Republicans who want neither a fire-breathing fundamentalist (Mr. Cruz) nor a volatile insult addict (Mr. Trump) gradually unite behind a more uplifting alternative.
Nomination politics are all about exceeding expectations and gathering momentum in early primary contests. Mr. Cruz barely met expectations by winning Iowa, where entrance polls showed that 64 per cent of Republican caucus-goers identified as "born-again Christian." Mr. Trump vastly underperformed the expectations he curiously kept raising by hyping his poll numbers.
Third place doesn't sound like much to brag about, but in Mr. Rubio's case, it served as validation to donors and relieved Republicans alike that anger has its limits. Ultimately, to keep voters engaged, candidates need to offer a vision based on more than revenge.
The 44-year-old Mr. Rubio is the best orator of the bunch and his life story and stump speech evoke the possibilities that can be every American's, rather than the resentments Mr. Cruz and Mr. Trump spew.
"That's not just my story. That's our story, that's America's story," the son of penniless and uneducated Cuban immigrants tells voters. "When our work is done, here is what history will say of this generation. It will say that we lived in the early years of this new century, in an uncertain and difficult time, but we remembered who we were. We rose up to the challenge of our time. We confronted our problems and solved them. Because [we] did, the American dream didn't just survive; it reached more people and changed more lives than ever before."
It's obviously not for nothing that since he burst onto the national political radar in 2010, upsetting Florida's then-popular GOP governor in the state's Senate race, Mr. Rubio has been called the Republican Obama. It may be his Achilles heel. A compelling personal narrative and oratorical prowess are not guarantors of a successful presidency.
The senator counters that it has not been Barack Obama's lack of experience that has made his presidency so disappointing, but rather his policies and inability to forge coalitions in Congress.
Mr. Rubio rode the Tea Party wave in 2010, but he has been repudiated by the movement for his efforts to pass immigration reform (he now says securing the border must precede any move to grant a path to citizenship to the country's 11 million illegal immigrants) and his hawkish foreign policy (which, when push comes to shove, is not all that different from Hillary Clinton's).
Next week's New Hampshire primary will determine whether Mr. Rubio emerges as the designated, saner alternative to the angermeisters or still must fight former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Ohio Governor John Kasich and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie for that title. He must beat his establishment rivals to sustain his momentum through the Feb. 20 South Carolina primary (in which he is favoured) and the March 1 Super Tuesday in states that promise to deliver a string of victories for Mr. Cruz.
If he does that, and Mr. Bush and Mr. Kasich have faded or dropped out of the race by the March 15 Ohio and Florida primaries, Mr. Rubio will have a much clearer path to the nomination. The oddsmakers can already see it, with post-Iowa prediction markets propelling him far ahead of his rivals.
There's Marco.
Konrad Yakabuski